Sandy Hilliard
Picture: Two photos of Austin Earl "Sandy" Hilliard (1914-1982),
one as a young man surrounded by horses,
one posing in front of a weathered old axle in Teapot
Dome, Wyoming. (Photo #2 coming soon)
These are two pictures of the man I consider to be legendary,
my great uncle Sandy. He got the name from being the fair-haired, light
complected one of the Hilliard twins, the other being Walter Carl "Tuff"
Hilliard, my grandfather (I'm repeating all this so that everyone doesn't
get confused).
Sandy was trouble from day one. He liked to fight,
liked to tease his brothers and sisters, and generally liked to raise hell
in whatever form he could. Tuff, though, generally had his number, which
a childhood story illustrates.
The two boys were playing with a rope that belonged
to Sandy. Sandy had convinced Tuff to charge by him like a bull, bellowing
and snorting. Tuff did, and Sandy roped him.
Tuff told Sandy not to rope him any more, and Sandy
said okay. Then Tuff bellowed by, and Sandy roped him again. This time,
Tuff got out his jackknife and cut Sandy's rope in half.
As Tuff later told me, "then the fight was on."
It was one of many, including several during the famous Hilyard Family
Reunion of 1926, depicted in the long photo on the Hilliard Family Gathering
Web Site. Tuff and Sandy, shown at the far right (from the viewer's angle),
are squatting down next to their dad. Tuff always said they acted so badly
at the reunion that their father made them go off with their uncle, Noah
Brenneman, a Mennonite elder who wore a flowing white beard and whose gaze
made them cower.
Sandy grew up living hard and fast. He, like Tuff,
played high school football and basketball, and worked in the oil fields
(for Marathon and later Sinclair) after high school. Eventually, Sandy
became a drilling boss, the man in the field who supervises drilling operations,
back-breaking work involving corralling roughnecks and working with fragile
and often faulty equipment.
When he wasn't drilling oil wells, he could usually
be found in the local bar, or drilling someone else's wife. Sandy was an
alcoholic; a sad fact, but one flavored with the usual colorful stories.
He drank and got drunk in every bar from Casper to Calgary, spent more
than a few nights in jail, had a couple of wives, many dogs and a few horses,
three of which he is posing with in one of the photos shown. The other
photo shows him in 1969, after thirty-five years of hard living. He is
posing in front of "Bull Wheels," which were used on oil rigs in the "old
days" of the oil business.
My favorite story about Sandy concerns an attempted
visit with my granddad and his family. Sandy came down on Christmas eve
after having too many drinks at some local watering hole. Driving drunk,
he was picked up by the local police, who called my granddad to come to
the jail to get him.
Granddad went down to the jail and beheld a pitiful
sight: Sandy in a jail cell, looking like something the cat dragged in.
Apparently, Tuff always had a kind of leveling effect on his brother; Sandy
tended to be a little more subdued around the more stolid and serious Tuff.
So Tuff walks in, sees his brother sitting in the jail cell, and looks
at him with a combination of shame and sorrow.
Sandy looks up, rubs his eyes, sees his brother
staring at him and says, "Aw hell, Tuff, don't feel bad. I've been in jail
before."
He pauses, looks around the jail cell, and then
says to Tuff, "Hell, I've been in this jail before."
And indeed he had.
Sandy retired in Calgary, Canada, after having drilled
oil wells all over the West, including some of the first in Prudhoe Bay,
Alaska. Late in life, he became diabetic and stove up due to years of hard
work in the fields.
At length, having lost his ability to truly raise
hell in the tradition he'd become accustomed to, and with no children of
his own, Sandy exited the world in his own unique way. He quit taking his
insulin, went out to his car with a bottle of booze in tow, and was found
dead a day later. It is exactly how he told his brother Tuff he wanted
to go.
Tuff and Sandy were the stuff of legends. Rough
boys, tough men. Handy and capable, and as opposite in temperament as two
brothers could possibly be. I've talked to people in their 90s who remember
"those wild Hilliard boys." They were vivid people, and I've often thought
their lives would make a great book or movie; in fact, I've done some work
on a story about them that I'm going to finish one of these days.
Anyway, these are two great pix of Sandy. A larger-than-life
Hilliard whom I only met once when I was a small boy, when he visited our
family around 1969 or so during a trip to Denver to get his back worked
on.
CONTINUE THE JOURNEY
Written by Bronson Hilliard